At the Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato, Minn., in 1997, I disgraced myself at the trivia contest. In front of my daughter, Josephine, then 7 years old, and several hundred similarly dedicated “Betsy-Tacy” fans, I answered the question “What was the decoration on Betsy Ray’s wedding cake?” with the very wrong answer: a bell. The cake was in fact decorated with a dove; the bell, it will be recalled, was hanging decoratively in the living room.

This year, at the 2012 convention — “or, as I like to think of it,” the mistress of ceremonies declared, “the 102nd reunion of the Deep Valley High School Class of 1910!” — I would make no such mistake. In my preparatory rereading before our third Mankato trip together, Josephine delicately suggested, I might pay particular attention to the series’s nuptial and homemaking details.

Deep Valley was the name Maud Hart Lovelace gave her hometown, Mankato, in the 10 Betsy-Tacy books she published between 1940 and 1955 but set much earlier, during the period of her own childhood. The first book, “Betsy-Tacy,” begins in 1897, when Betsy is about to turn 5, and the series continues through “Betsy’s Wedding” in 1917, with the world at war. All tell the story of an idyllic Midwestern girlhood, but also reflect the approach of the new century, from the first horseless carriages to the strutting soldiers at Betsy’s boardinghouse in Munich.

Like similar evocations of an earlier age and more “innocent” comings-of-age, the Betsy-Tacy books engender an almost fanatical devotion. But there’s also a sense that as children’s series go, they have flown below the radar, never quite developing the recognition of “Little Women,”“Anne of Green Gables” and the “Little House” books. Perhaps it’s because there hasn’t been a movie or a TV show. The books’ big cinematic moment came only tangentially in Nora Ephron’s 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail,” when Meg Ryan, portraying the owner of a small, independent children’s bookstore, introduces a little girl to Betsy: “This is her best friend, Tacy, whose real name is Anastacia, and then in the next book, Betsy and Tacy become friends with Tib. . . . ”

That recommendation is dead-on (the little girl demands all the books) — but it’s also meant to suggest that this is the kind of obscure children’s-book advice you would be unlikely to get from the less-informed employee at a soulless chain store like the one owned by Tom Hanks. In truth, there is an almost exclusive, conspiratorial glee to being a Betsy-Tacy fan. Lovelace’s books are a rarefied taste, known only to the cognoscenti. The Betsy-Tacy Society, founded in 1990, has in some ways played to this, with its trademark catchphrase, “I thought I was the only one!” This is a society of zealots, delighted to discover sisterhood and solidarity.

There were hundreds of us readers, nearly all women, chasing down “important sites” in Minneapolis and Mankato on a hot weekend in July. We visited “Betsy’s House” and “Tacy’s House,” where Lovelace and her real best friend, Frances Kenney, known as Bick, lived as children, right across the street from each other. The Betsy-Tacy Society now owns both houses, which have been designated national literary landmarks, and Betsy’s house has been evocatively furnished and restored. We took turns crowding into the little one-bedroom apartment where Lovelace and her husband had lived, the model for the newlyweds’ first apartment in “Betsy’s Wedding.” (There’s a dove on the cake, do you hear me? A dove!) The current tenant looked on in good-natured amusement, but the owner of another Betsy-Tacy-related home a few blocks away had apparently asked in no uncertain terms to keep the groups off her property.

I happened on Betsy and Tacy and Tib while growing up in New York City in the 1960s. I read through the first four, the “childhood” books, with their delicate drawings by Lois Lenski, the brilliant illustrator whose great subject was regional American childhood, and then passed them on to my own daughter when she was about 5.

When Betsy graduates from elementary school, she also transitions from the round-faced, brown-braided child of Lenski’s folkloric illustrations to the slim and swoony, pompadoured adolescent depicted by Vera Neville, who illustrated the last six books, including the “high school” novels, one for each year. For many readers, these books are paramount, with their glamorous Gibson-girl-style illustrations, and their romantic subplots, steeped in the courtship customs of long ago. (“When you come out into the hall you’re given your program,” Betsy’s older sister, Julia, tells her, “and the boys rush up to ask for dances.”)

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At this year’s conference, Josephine drew up the trivia contest. The conference organizers had neglected to plan for one, and invited her to put together questions for the after-hours, cash-bar Perfectly Awful Girls activity (Tony, one of Betsy’s beaus, becomes disaffected from the high school crowd in “Betsy Was a Junior,” and starts frequenting saloons and “going around with a perfectly awful girl”). Before administering the fiendishly difficult contest, Josephine took the opportunity to recount the story of my wedding cake gaffe to all assembled.

The real heroine of the 2012 convention, no question, was Jennifer Hart, an associate publisher at William Morrow, who received a standing ovation when she was first pointed out, and then again and most resoundingly when she spoke. It was she who, while at Harper Perennial, brought about new editions of the high school books, then completed the set with an omnibus edition of the four elementary school books, and two additional volumes of related “Deep Valley stories” in recent years. She did it, of course, because she too grew up with Betsy.

“People come up to me, and they thank me,” she said. “I want to say it was completely selfish on my part because I love these books so much.”

The Betsy-Tacy novels weren’t always obscure. When “Betsy’s Wedding” was first published in 1955, Lovelace had the good luck to get Esther Hautzig as a publicist. Hautzig, who herself wrote a classic children’s book, “The Endless Steppe,” based on her girlhood in Siberia (where her Lithuanian Jewish family was deported by the Soviets), fell in love with the America of Deep Valley and carried out an ambitious national publicity program, featuring a traveling life-size doll in a wedding dress.

As with the “Little House” books, and more recently with Harry Potter, in the Betsy-Tacy series the narrative voice ages with the characters. “Betsy-Tacy,” like “Little House in the Big Woods,” is about a 5-year-old, told in simple sentences with a straightforward vocabulary — a book to be read by, or to, a relatively young child. “Betsy’s Wedding,” like “These Happy Golden Years,” is about a young woman (with a dove on her wedding cake), written in denser, more complex sentences, with a richer vocabulary than its predecessors. The narrative sensibility grows up with the characters, though children are invariably tempted to read ahead of their ages (think of all those 10-year-olds determined to follow Harry and Hermione into adolescence). Rereading the books as an adult allows you to experience a kind of meta-novel in which you see the characters change from the inside out.

At the end of the conference, we bought our final souvenirs: cards and T-shirts and special pads of paper for making lists (“Betsy was always making lists,” the pad proclaims). When I went up to collect a set of old magazines I won at the silent auction, I discovered that someone who wished to remain anonymous had bid on an additional item as a gift for Josephine and me. A box was pressed into my arms: inside was a large Christmas tree topper in the shape of a dove.

Perri Klass is a professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University. She writes the “18 and Under” column for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2012, on Page BR27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Growing Up Together. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe